Bricks and Immortality

By

Julie V. Iovine

April 29, 2013 5:06 p.m. ET

Dallas

The presidential library is an architectural conundrum. Its function is split between lofty symbolism and menial tasks: embodying legacy and storing papers. No model exists, leaving each commander in chief to propose his own ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt adapted his Hyde Park, N.Y., home to be the first presidential library museum.

While there is no typical building type, there is an expected architectural tone: dignified but not condescending; commanding but not imperial; distinctive but not luxurious. Visitors are to be awed but not intimidated—after all, they are footing much of the bill through congressional appropriations. The presidential library is both an archive paid for and maintained through federal funds and a museum created by a dedicated foundation that builds and donates the entire facility to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

ENLARGE

A classically inflected modern edifice with vernacular touches that almost succeeds in masking its enormous size.
Peter Aaron / Otto for Robert A.M. Stern Architects, LLP

It's a balancing act that presidential libraries have addressed to sometimes jarring effect. At the Lyndon B. Johnson Library, a midcentury futuristic cube at the University of Texas at Austin, the imperial and the folksy are at odds: Sweeping travertine stairs and a monumental display of scarlet storage boxes emblazoned with gold presidential seals contrast with an animatronic, Stetson-wearing Johnson posed at a split-rail fence. The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., a vast tile-roofed hacienda dwarfed by an adjacent hangar housing his Air Force One, pits accessibility against power. Outside the entrance of the presidential library for George H.W. Bush in College Station, Texas, five bronze horses stampede across a replica in bronze of the Berlin Wall, while inside a Studebaker from an early cross-country campaign mythologizes the long journey of Bush Sr.

The challenge for any presidential-library architect only begins with warehousing vast accumulations of documentary material and creating a landmark that will attract tourists and donations. Increasingly, there is also a third component: a home-base for postpresidency activities. But if anyone can handle the contradictory impulses and requirements, it is the architect Robert A.M. Stern, who has just designed the 13th presidential library. The George W. Bush Presidential Center on the Dallas campus of Southern Methodist University (Laura Bush's alma mater) was dedicated on Thursday and opens to the public on Wednesday.

The multifaceted Mr. Stern is the dean of the Yale Architecture School, the Ralph Lauren of tastefully high-end residential design, a former board member of The Walt Disney Co., and the co-author of a definitive multivolume architectural history of New York. For President Bush, he has designed a classically inflected modern edifice with vernacular touches—including deep overhangs and porches for shade, pecan paneling and mesquite floors—that almost succeed in masking the enormous size of the 226,560-square-foot compound. (Presidential libraries have their own space race: The FDR Library topped out at 30,000 square feet; the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, at 90,000 square feet; Bill Clinton's, at 125,000 square feet.)

Mr. Stern buried the warehouse part of the project into a contoured landscape so that he could create two entrances—a kind of church and state separation—for the museum and archive facing north, across the street from SMU's Greek Row, and for the George W. Bush Institute, a public-policy think tank, with a more formal circular driveway on a lower level facing west.

Mr. Stern is one of the country's most fluent users of classical language for architecture. The building teems with erudite references and adaptations of classical elements. A square lantern rises behind the columned entrance porch, or peristyle, to be a beacon glowing across campus and beyond; yellow granite courses delineate window frames and cornices, also sprucing up unrelieved stretches of Texan red brick. The floor plan could pass for that of a sprawling Pompeiian villa. As inner sanctum, there is a Texan doppelgänger of the White House Rose Garden (with roses embedded among the horsemint, bluebonnet and other more local plants), an appealing embellishment for a presidential library where replicas of the Oval Office have become de rigueur.

The museum portion of the complex draws visitors immediately past a restaurant and gift shop into a Cordoba-like, multicolumned lobby and the sky-high Freedom Hall where an LED installation is programmable for any occasion. Just beyond is the main exhibition of momentous moments from the former president's life and career designed by the PRD Group of Chantilly, Va.

Contemporary museum craft demands interactivity, and it appears here as the Decision Points Theater, where visitors can test themselves on such crises as the Iraq invasion and Hurricane Katrina. There is an exact re-creation of the claustrophobic White House Situation Room, right down to the actual paneling salvaged before a renovation, but pride of place goes to events surrounding 9/11, including a substantial piece of a World Trade Center column. Presidential-library exhibitions are initially highly biased, even hagiographic, and curators understand that it will take years before they achieve historic objectivity (when it opened in 1979, the Kennedy Library did not fully address the president's assassination); the Bush exhibition is as upbeat as they come.

Across a courtyard (featuring bronze statues of father and son, Bush 41 and Bush 43), the George W. Bush Institute is far more stately, adhering to a stricter, symmetrical layout, complete with a columned portico entrance where a replica of the White House lantern swings. Large-scale reception rooms and a state dining room for 80, inspired in its detail by the East Dining Room, suggest that Mr. Bush plans to be a world diplomat. (An adjacent reception area is papered with the same wallpaper used in a White House powder room.) There is an extended, elegantly proportioned loggia where foreign dignitaries will be allowed to smoke; it overlooks a seven-acre park with local grasses and an arroyo designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, abutting a 15-lane highway and open to students.

Sensitive integration into the collegiate Georgian style of the SMU campus, where even the trash cans are shaped like classical urns, was a high priority, said Laura Bush during an architecture tour she led in February She was much involved in the planning and construction of the $250 million complex.

Ultimately, presidential libraries are hybrid curiosities; they can be highly selective, some might say reticent, in the history they retell, but personally very revealing. And so as a Rorschach ink blot, the George W. Bush Presidential Center speaks of considerable sophistication and an eagerness to please, but also of a very deep nostalgia for that last big home, the White House.

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